Electronic storage mechanisms have enabled accumulation of massive amounts of data. For instance, data that previously required volumes of books for recordation can now be stored electronically without the expense of printing paper and with a fraction of the physical space needed for storage of paper. Many users employ database systems or other systems for storage and organization of data. To maintain data in a readily retrievable format and in an easily understandable manner, the data can be arranged in, or represented by, a tabular format. That is to say, the tabular data can be organized in rows and columns, wherein each row can be regarded as an entity described by properties that are contained in the columns of the row.
In some situations, a user may be interested in performing goal seeks in the tabular data. As such, the user is interested in a particular outcome and would like to know the changes within the data that can bring about that particular outcome. Thus, seeking a goal becomes the problem of finding an optimum input for the function so that the result (e.g., the value of the target column) is as close as possible to the desired target value.
Generally, the implementation of goal seeking is based on cell formulae that requires a target cell to be functionally dependent (through cell formulae) on the input cells. This implementation consists in a search over the set of possible values for the input cells. The search succeeds if one of the inputs yields the desired value for the target cell. Thus, functional dependency (cell formula) between the target column and the remaining cells is needed to perform goal seeking.